Generally speaking, a view entity is a collection of participating or member entities joined together by a number of relations. This collection forms a structure, where every member entity in a view entity is connected to the overall structure, no entity is left out. In short, a view entity provides a single view of a group of interconnected entities. This is very convenient for performing complex database queries that need to take such high-level views of data.
Technically speaking, a view entity could possibly be a complex hierarchy of relations between a number of member entities. The term hierarchy is used because the structure described by a view entity is not cyclical but is strictly top-down. This does not mean that a member entity will not be referenced more than once. A member entity can even be referenced in more than one level, say at a higher level and then again at a lower level, in effect giving the impression that the structure described is cyclical.
When we...